What we have lost, writes Rob Weatherill in this wide-ranging meditation on contemporary culture, 'is our sense of, and a necessary respect for, the unconscious, for otherness, for mystery, for death'. We are preoccupied with survival and gratification at the expense of human suffering and concern. This is the denial of the psyche: a levelling-out of meanings and values. The central paradox explored in Cultural Collapse is that while we enjoy greater freedom and abundance than ever before, at least in the rich parts of the world, we can't help noticing a corresponding inner weakness and loss of control. We are also alarmed by the prevalence of sex abuse, rape, hard porn, and violence. There is nothing new in these concerns; they have been voiced throughout the modern period. But psychoanalysis can and must make some comment on this severance of meanings, and this Weatherill sets out to do. Cultural Collapse is not an academic study of psychoanalytic thought about culture. It proceeds from direct experience of a schizoid culture. The analytic space, from which Weatherill writes, gives people the freedom to be listened to properly, and because of this it has learnt something about the human condition and contemporary culture. Weatherill looks with an analytically informed eye at the loss of a religious dimension and the rise of new forms of utopianism; racism; addiction; the crisis in parenting and education; feminism and the collapse of male narcissism; and the loss of private space under capitalism. At a time when the relations between morality, the social fabric and the inner world are causing distress throughout the world, Rob Weatherill provides a searching study of the growingimpoverishment of life in Western society.

At a time when the relations between morality, the social fabric and the inner world are causing distress throughout the world, Rob Weatherill provides a searching study of the growing impoverishment of life in Western society. He plumbs the depths of the ways our culture impoverishes and does violence to our private selves and spaces. He addresses himself to the role of ideals in psychoanalysis and brings a Kleinian perspective to bear on the schizoid nature of modern culture; the emptiness of the addict; the crisis in education; feminism and the shattering of male narcissism.